I was taking a taxi to the office in Bangalore last week, when a man riding a truck asked my driver for directions.  This is not unusual, as Bangalore's street layout is so irregular that very few people memorize more than a few square kilometers of it.  Taxi drivers frequently ask each other for directions when outside of whatever portion of Bangalore they know well.  Nor was it surprising that the discussion was in Kannada, the Dravidian local language of Karnataka, the state containing Bangalore.

What surprised me was that I understood what my driver was saying: proceed to the next signal, and then turn right.  I was wondering how I could possibly know this, when the man apparently asked my taxi driver to repeat the directions.  I listened much more carefully this time, and heard the words "signal-a", "next-a", and "right-a", somewhat distorted with the Kannada accent but unmistakable.

So English words are working their way even into the Dravidian dialects of South India.  Now, I can understand Kannada's adoption of  the English word "signal", but "next" and "right"?  Surely Kannada already had perfectly good words for these two concepts!  On the other hand, given some of the odd words and phrases that have been adopted by English in my lifetime, who am I to judge?